FreePBX/In house VOIP Support

[Jamman960]

Hi All,

 

I'm looking into setting up a Freepbx based system using a Sangoma FreePBX appliance and 40 Yealink phones across our 2 sites, we currently have an Aastra system which is costing us the earth and is nearing the end of its 7 year lease.

 

Before taking on a Junior Technician earlier this year I'd decided I didn't have enough time to setup and manage a Freepbx/asterisk based system on my own so have approached various phone companies for quotes on Mitel, Samsung, LG etc systems, I've now told some of these companies that I'm thinking of going down the DIY route and they've all come out with horror stories of how they've "rescued" companies from such systems etc etc, one this morning stated that Yealink phones aren't much good and don't work as you'd expect.

 

I suspect all of these are either genuine cases where people had cut corners and not set it up right or pure fiction but who knows... could those of you supporting open source phone systems please give me a rough idea of how much IT support time ends up being dedicated to phones once its all up and running? I'm expecting it to be much the same as our existing system where I only really get involved with moves or settings changes... I'm assuming our data cabling isn't going to start crumbling like our ancient telcom cabling is so it should actually be a reduction in support time(once setup)

 

in my mind VOIP is well within the realms of IT support compared to traditional propriatary systems and isn't as complex as setting up a windows network from scratch, so long as the switches are setup with vlans and qos we're good to go.

[localzuk]

I've been running an Asterisk/FreePBX system here since 2007/8 now. Not had any issues with it! We have been using Grandstream phones here.

 

That said, we're looking to replace the system soon, and expand across our multi academy trust.

 

I barely touch the system - occasionally calls get stuck (due to the particularities of how calls are ended on PSTN lines). Probably do about an hour's maintenance a month at most! Averaged over the year.

[2ilent8cho]

Moved to Elastix (Free, basically a nicely packaged Asterisk) in 2009. Was my side project for 2 months learning how it all worked, once i got my head around it we ordered the ISDN line and 10 channels and 80 Aastra phones for use with it.

 

It taken up very little time since then it just sits there and just works. Next time i expect to spend any considerable time with it will be when i get rid of ISDN and move to SIP Trunks , but i have until 2025 for that so plenty of time yet.

 

So if you currently have and own Aastra handsets they should work fine with Asterisk or Elastix as they do for us.

[Sephiroth]

I can't speak for FreePBX (...yet, I still need to sort that out at my house...), but I can say that Yealink handsets are fantastic for the money. We have over 100 of them here. We went for the T19s for classroom, T20 for standard users and offices, W52 dect phones for our 2 kitchens and T26s for admin, and select staff where appropriate. We have had 3 fail over the course of the 2.5 years that they've been in service. If you use headsets, we also got a load of BT H31 headsets which have a configurable switch on them to select the phone make, and these work flawlessly.

[Jamman960]

Fantastic, thanks all thats what I was hoping to hear

 

I'm thinking about going straight to SIP trunks as we've currently got 4x ISDN2 connections in place with different numbers across our sites

 

Our existing phones are all TDM/Digital handsets and are all leased so need to go back(sooner rather than later!)

 

I'm planning to go with T23G's(getting a fantastic price atm) in general areas followed by T29G's in offices along with a few wifi sip phones, we're paying an absolute fortune at the moment so no matter what I buy results in a huge saving

 

Its funny to hear all the horror stories from phone companies, I was told this morning that one small company realised that their IT guy was spending all of his time fixing the system so it ended up being cheaper to go with a proprietary system...

[localzuk]

If its set up right, there's nothing to fix!

 

Its not even particularly complicated software to be honest. So, I can't see why anyone would spend any amount of time "fixing" their system.

 

And even then, if you are still unsure, you can get paid support for it!

[Jamman960]

Exactly, im going to go for Sangoma gold support for a year or so then decide whether it's worth continuing with, we can always get support by the hour via voipon if necessary, hoping to get my techie fully familiar with it so I can go on annual leave in peace.

 

Having done everything on site here for the last 8 years on my own without external support I can't see this being particularly taxing, figured I'd ask having heard one too many so called horror stories from telecom companies wanting more business in case I was missing something.

[FN-GM]

I have used FreePBX for about 5 years. It has worked great, in the past it has been Cisco phones but now we use Yealink phones. They work really well. Its worth pointing out that the Sangoma phones are infact Yealink phones with another badge.

 

I wouldn't get an appliance if I was you. I would go for a VM instead. Just for the same reasons you don't go for physical servers these days.

[Oaktech]

Has anyone used the ARM deployment of Elastix? It seems too good to be true that we could replace our hulking great panasonic exchange with a raspberry pi...

[dhicks]

I'm thinking about going straight to SIP trunks as we've currently got 4x ISDN2 connections in place with different numbers across our sites

 

I'm a day late to this thread, but just to pretty much concur with what others have said: we use an IQ PBX Asterisk-based appliance with four ISDN-based external lines, a 4G backup, and Yealink handsets. Total install cost was around £10,000 over 60-odd rooms / handsets, at least a third of the cheapest quote we had from a phone company. We installed new PoE-capable switches and new cabling throughout the building at the same time (separate budget), so our infrastructure was easily capable of handling the traffic and power requirements - VoIP traffic doesn't actually take that much bandwidth by today's standard's compared with some other stuff you get on a network these days.

 

Most of our switches are UPS-backed from a central point, giving us a couple of hours uptime for the phone system in case of a power cut. You might need to consider how important this is to you - these days, if a desk phone isn't working people just switch over to a mobile in emergencies, and you can always put a small UPS in a couple of strategic places if needed.

 

I'd tend to agree with the go-straight-for-SIP option - the only real problem we had with setup was hooking up the existing physical phone lines, which had some issues with interference over our aging BT wiring. Using SIP connections would skip that issue. By the time we'd debugged what was going on with the PBX appliance we'd learnt enough about Asterisk to have made it not worth the bother of buying an appliance, we might just as well have installed Asterisk ourselves, it's not really that complicated, plus you don't have to rely on the appliance maker for updates.

 

Its funny to hear all the horror stories from phone companies, I was told this morning that one small company realised that their IT guy was spending all of his time fixing the system so it ended up being cheaper to go with a proprietary system...

 

Our phone system, now it is set up, takes very little maintainance - we don't really have to do anything beyond adding handsets as needed. End users always tend towards things-were-better-with-the-old-system at the first hint of any kind of issue, and as support is now someone just round the corner they can go and talk to instead of some distant company, there's more oppotunity for them to complain more often. We've replaced both our phone system and our CCTV system - previously, both systems were run on older, outdated analouge equipment that, if one component had failed, would have resulted in days of downtime with no option than to wait until the external support company happened to turn up with spares (actually, I don't think the phone system even had spares available any more). Now, if there's an issue we can go and investigate straight away, and even rebuilding the entire system from scratch doesn't take that long if it was ever neccesary.

[limawhiskey]

Most of our switches are UPS-backed from a central point

How do you do this? Is it a separate electrical circuit with a backup? I ask as it's something I have been thinking about lately and we have a large site that would need many UPS's across all of our network cabs.

Edited October 26, 2016 by limawhiskey

[p858snake]

How do you do this? Is it a separate electrical circuit with a backup? I ask as it's something I have been thinking about lately and we have a large site that would need many UPS's across all of our network cabs.

 

Depending on the setup, Most of the handsets are POE so UPS on the switches and server.

[dhicks]

How do you do this? Is it a separate electrical circuit with a backup?

 

Yes - we have a large UPS (an APC Smart-UPS RT 8000VA), along with a couple of external battery packs, connected to an appropriately-sized circuit (20A at 240V, I seem to remember) led directly from the main distribution board in the power inlet cupboard. That then powers a number of standard 240V AC sockets around the school as well as a couple of 240V commando sockets in the server cupboard which are then distributed to power distribution strips in the server rack. This, of course, did mean running separate AC power cabling around the school. We have quite a compact site - a 5-storey town-house in central London - so most cable runs are actually quite short.

 

We have UPS-backed sockets for the front-desk staff and the headmistress, and for the switches. Due to the way the building is laid out (with a hefty fire barrier between two halves) we have some switches we couldn't reach, on a couple of those we've put separate 1U UPSes in the switch cabinet along with the switch. From experience of that, if you're fitting small cabinets for switches, make sure they are deep enough - a modern PoE-capable switch might be just 1U high but they tend to be fairly deep to fit all the power gubbins in. They can be fairly noisy, too, so if you're fitting cabinets it might be worth getting accousticly muffled ones. Also, of course, make sure you can attach them to the wall wall really securely - even a small 1U UPS is heavy.